A Public Death: Indiana newspaper reader fights for access to death records

Newspaper reader Rita Ward is taking a stand for all of us.

She is arguing that death certificates should be publicly available records. Who is arguing otherwise? The Vanderburgh County Health Department in Indiana. In May 2012, the health department stopped providing causes of death to the Evansville Courier & Press and the rest of the public, and so the newspaper stopped publishing those causes on its public records page.

Ward, a loyal Courier & Press reader, didn’t like that. She told staff writer Mark Wilson that she “is interested because of the public health implications the information might reveal, such as possible links to smoking-related illnesses.”

"I truly do believe printing the cause of death is important. I believe it is a great public tool that can help people," she said. "Maybe a reader might see a neighbor who died of colon cancer and make the decision to have their first overdue colonoscopy. It can be a first step toward a change for the better. It can touch a reader. It's personal. That's why it is important."

According to court records, Ward submitted a written request in June 2012 to the Health Department, asking for access to death certificates from May 2012.

The Health Department denied the request. Ward then filed a formal complaint with the Public Access Counselor, Joseph Hoage, saying that the denial violated the state’s Access to Public Records Act. The counselor initially said that the denial didn’t violate the act. Then Hoage followed up with an “amended advisory opinion,” saying that Ward’s request should not have been denied.

That’s when the Evansville Courier & Press got involved. In July 2012, the newspaper submitted a request to the health department asking for access to all death certificates since the beginning of May 2012. The health department denied that request, too. So Ward and the Courier & Press sued the Health Department in the Vanderburgh Circuit Court, alleging a violation of the Access to Public Records Act. They lost the case. The Courier & Press and Ward appealed. They lost that case, too.

They appealed yet again. So now it’s up to the Indiana Supreme Court. You might think that the case was hopeless, but consider this. Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller has filed an amicus brief – a friend-of-the-court brief – in support of the newspaper’s case. He wrote:

In keeping with the principles of transparency and accountability, we ask merely for a return to what had been the longstanding practice of making the cause of death in death certificates promptly available to the public who has the right to that information.

At issue is the difference between the death certificate and the online death registry, which are governed by separate state laws. State law requires counties to keep death certificates, which list the cause of death and are supposed to be made available for public review. But the state also maintains an online registry – and only spouses, immediate family or others with a direct interest have access to that information.

Hoage, the Public Access Counselor, explained in his advisory opinion how the two state laws, in a way, complement each other (I’ve omitted the long state law citations):

Pursuant to [state law A], in order to obtain a copy of the certificate of death, the applicant seeking such certificate must have a direct interest in the matter or the information must be necessary for the determination of a personal or property right or for the compliance with state or federal law. Regardless, pursuant to [state law B], the local health officer shall from the death certificate make a permanent record containing the following: name, sex, age, place of death, residence, residence address of the deceased during the last two years of the decedent’s life, and social security number. The records shall be open to public for inspection purposes, except that the social security number shall be kept confidential.

That sounds like an easy enough rule to follow. But the health department’s attorney, Joseph Harrison, has taken a different position. He says that only one state law applies here, the one that says only family members and people with a “direct interest in the matter” can even see the death certificates. He told The Statehouse File:

To me, the legislature has already spoken on this issue – it is clear you can’t go to [the] department of health and ask for the death certificate with the cause of death listed.

Some folks in Indiana will be feeling a bit of déjà vu right now.

This same health department got into a battle over death certificates in the 1970s. The lawsuit then resulted in an opinion by the Indiana Court of Appeals in 1975 (Evansville-Vanderburgh County Dept. of Health v. Evansville Printing Corp.). The Printing Corp. was the company that, at the time, ran both the Press and the Courier, when they were separate, competing newspapers. The ruling affirmed that death certificates were public records.

Hopefully that same common sense will prevail this time.

Photo by Orin Zebest via Flickr.